NEW DELHI — Indian
police have shot dead a tiger dubbed the "Man-eater of Champaran"
that killed at least nine people, in a major operation involving 200 people
including trackers on elephants, officials said on Sunday.
اضافة اعلان
The big cat had terrorized
locals on the fringes of the Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Champaran in eastern
India, killing at least six people in the past month including a woman and her
eight-year-old son on Saturday.
Even before the two
latest kills, authorities had designated the tiger, reportedly a male three or
four years old, as a "man-eater", meaning that it could be shot.
Earlier attempts to
tranquilize the animal had failed.
"Two teams went
into the forest on two elephants on Saturday afternoon, and the third one
waited where we thought the tiger would exit — and we fired five rounds to kill
it there," local police chief Kiran Kumar told AFP.
With local villagers
beating tin containers, it took about six hours for the team — with eight
shooters and about 200 forest department officials — to complete the operation,
Kumar said.
Officials said that
large sugarcane fields made it easier for the tiger to stay hidden and attack
local villagers and their livestock.
The victims included a
12-year-old girl dragged from her bed on Wednesday night, reports said.
Locals in the
impoverished villages around the reserve in Bihar state stopped going out in
the evening after the tiger's first attack maimed a teenager in May.
But "despite the
lurking fear of tiger, it was not possible for us to confine ourselves in our
homes as we needed to feed our cattle", local villager Ram Kisun Yadav
told the Hindustan Times newspaper.
Locals celebrated
after the animal was finally shot.
"It was a
sleepless night for the whole village. We kept beating tin containers to shoo
away the tiger if at all it was hiding near our village," villager Paltu
Mahato told the Hindustan Times.
Conservationists blame
the rapid expansion of human settlements around forests and key wildlife
corridors for animals like elephants and tigers for an increase in man-animal
conflict in parts of India.
Nearly 225 people were
killed in tiger attacks between 2014 and 2019 in India, according to government
figures.
More than 200 tigers
were killed by poachers or electrocution between 2012 and 2018, the data
showed.
India is home to
around 70 percent of the world's tigers and the tiger population was estimated
at 2,967 in 2018.
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